A Facebook page as the default web presence for a physical business is user-hostile. It's at Facebook's whim that pages get tossed behind a login window, and then what of those who don't want to use Facebook? Or have reason not to use Facebook?

John Gruber, absolutely killing it on share buttons, particularly on Medium:

A website should not fight the browser. Let the browser provide the chrome, and simply provide the content. Web developers know this is right — these dickbars are being rammed down their throats by SEO experts. The SEO folks are the same dopes who came up with the genius strategy of requiring 5-10 megabytes of privacy-intrusive CPU-intensive JavaScript on every page load that slows down websites. Now they come to their teams and say, “Our pages are too slow — we gotta move to AMP so our pages load fast.”

I love Medium. I don't mean to be overly harsh on Medium, but he's right.

Share buttons — dickbars, in Gruber's parlance — are not only unnecessary, but they're starting to border on user-hostile. They're absolutely one of the worst things about the modern web experience, made a thousand times worse when they're also presented in a modal when the page first loads.

Gotta wonder about the actual savvy of all the marketing/design groups telling clients to do this. If your goal is to boost engagement this way, you're spending too much time on things that aren't the content.